Williams College Museum of Art Announces Retirement of Senior Curator
September 17, 2007

Williamstown, MA—The Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) announced today that Deborah Rothschild, Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, will retire effective October 1, 2007.  Dr. Rothschild, curator of the current exhibition "Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy," has worked at the museum since 1981. She began her tenure at WCMA as an assistant curator and part-time lecturer in art history and rapidly distinguished herself as a curator with a specialty in modern and contemporary art. Over the past nearly twenty-five years, Dr. Rothschild has curated landmark projects that have set the standard for college museum exhibitions nationally including: “James Turrell,” (1991); “Yardbird Suite: David Hammons,” (1993);  “Graphic Design in the Mechanical Age,” (1998, with Darra Goldstein and Ellen Lupton); “Introjection: Tony Oursler’s Mid-Career Survey,” (1999); “Prelude to a Nightmare: Art, Politics, and Hitler’s Early Years in Vienna 1906-1913” (2002); and “Constructs for a Brave New World: El Lissitzky’s Proun and Victory Over the Sun Portfolios,” (2004). Both “Introjection” and “Prelude to a Nightmare,” were cited as among the finest exhibitions by the International Association of Art Critics in the year of their presentations at WCMA. Many of the exhibitions Dr. Rothschild shepherded traveled to major museums as diverse as the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., the Cooper Hewitt, New York, (Smithsonian), the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo’s Suntory Museum, IVAM Valencia, Spain, the Dallas Museum of Art, and university galleries including Yale, Princeton, and the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington.

"Deborah is the epitome of the scholarly curator," says director Lisa Corrin. "Her exhibitions have greatly expanded the field of modern and contemporary art and charted new territory in exhibition concepts. She has established herself as a tireless researcher who displays the art she studies in the rich cultural context in which it was originally created—she leaves the museum with an indelible mark on the study of modern and contemporary art as well as on the curatorial field."

This year, Dr. Rothschild completed work on “Making it New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy,” for which she received a Getty Foundation Curatorial Research Fellowship. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the first exhibition organized by WCMA to be so honored, it has received critical media acclaim in Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, Newsweek, The Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal, among others.

Dr. Rothschild also mentored several generations of Williams College students, involving them in exhibitions and even inviting undergraduate and graduate art history majors to co-curate exhibitions that provided a springboard for their own curatorial careers. These collaborations include “Seven Sisters: New Work by Jacqueline Humphries,” (2006) with Hannah Blumenthal (Williams MA ’06), and “Sites of Recollection: Four Altars and A Rap Opera,” with Julia Barnes Mandle (Williams ’92). An advocate for the collection, she actively acquired contemporary art for WCMA including works by Tony Oursler, Michael Singer, Amalia Mesa-Bains, David Hammons, and Wang Qingsong.

Dr. Rothschild has given generously of her time as a volunteer. She is a member of the Board of Directors of Images Cinema and the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College. She has also served on the Exhibitions Committee of the Berkshire Museum and on the Advisory Boards of the American Federation of the Arts and the Berkshire Art Association.

The Williams College Museum of Art is open Tuesday through Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and on Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m. Admission is free and the museum is wheelchair accessible. Publicity images for this and other current exhibitions are available for use by the press. Contact: Suzanne A. Silitch, Director of Public Relations and External Affairs, 413.597.3178

Photo credit: K.Kennefick 2007